The invention relates to a method and apparatus for increasing the transmission of a laser signal through a fog.
The problem of "seeing through" fog has been a persistent difficulty. A number of techniques have been employed in the past to disperse fog or shift to very long wavelengths (far infared or microwaves) to reduce the scatter created by fog droplets. Another method of penetrating fog has been to use very high laser light power to evaporate the fog droplets and reduce the particle size, thereby reducing the scatter in the path of the laser beam. Such a technique is quite costly due to amount of energy consumed by the evaporation process. The shift to microwave frequencies avoids the problem but at a tremendous loss in resolving power of the object being detected.